Hydroponics is an alternative to traditional farming. Hydroponics transitions farming from outdoor soil-based methodologies to an indoor or closed environment methodology. This transition provides several benefits and efficiencies including reduced or eliminated crop loss from insects or adverse weather, reduced water and fertilizer usage, and reduced land consumption as some factors. Hydroponics achieves these benefits and efficiencies by providing near complete control over the environmental factors affecting crop growth as well as what and how nutrients are fed to the crop.
The significant differences in these farming methodologies have also resulted in a fork in farming technology. Existing machinery developed to optimize and automate many traditional outdoor soil-based farming tasks are unusable for hydroponics. The existing machinery cannot be adapted or cannot operate in the confined space of a hydroponics environment. Consequently, many of the tasks that have long been automated or mechanized in traditional outdoor soil-based farming still involve manual or human labor in hydroponics.
One of the biggest disconnects in the technological fork between traditional outdoor soil-based farming and hydroponics is in harvesting. Traditional outdoor soil-based farming has long relied on tree shakers, harvesters, and other machinery to rapidly harvest organic matter from vines, plants, or trees. Hydroponics has no such equivalent. Hydroponics relies heavily, and almost exclusively, on human labor to harvest the hydroponically grown organic matter.
There is therefore a need to bridge the technological fork between traditional outdoor soil-based farming and hydroponics and incorporate more automation and mechanization for hydroponics. In particular, there is a need to automate and mechanize harvesting of organic matter from hydroponically grown vines, plants, or trees, whereby the automation and mechanization can execute within the indoor or closed confined farming environment of hydroponics.